José Clavijo y Fajardo’s satirical allegory, El tribunal de las damas, certainly fulfils the great Roman satirist Horace’s utili dulci dictum, so prized by Spain’s neoclassicists, on the importance of literature’s being both entertaining and instructive. Its witty representation of the age-old debate about the balance of power between the sexes, in the form of a court-room battle over the intro...
